Gustav mahler - symphonie nr. 2 auferstehung

As musical ideas that have dominated this movement, the whole symphony, and even other works by Mahler, dissolve into the ether – becoming slower, quieter, emptier, and more stunningly, breathtakingly etiolated and gossamer-thin in sound and substance – it all amounts to convincing evidence to support Leonard Bernstein’s view , shared by many of his conductor colleagues and listeners, too, that this music stands for a whole suite of deaths. There's Mahler’s own, since this is his last completed symphony, after he had witnessed the death of his daughter and when he knew that his life would be cut short by his heart condition. There's the death of tonality, which – in the musical context of 1910, this piece emblematically signals. It even heralds the death throes of the figure of the artist as hero in European culture.